Our fair group is growing friends.  We are starting down the path of proving that skill at chess has nothing to do with dedication, practice, or culture.  We all know that the most important factor is how long the lakes stay frozen every winter.  ;)

In order to continue to build our group I want to encourage all of you to do something that I regularily do.  Almost every time someone beats me in a game (which happens a lot of course) I invite them to join the group (unless he/she is a jerkwad). 

Thank you all for joining the group and the fact that so many of you stay active in our team matches and vote chess matches makes this really fun for me and hopefully makes it fun for you too.

You are welcome, I'm glad to join this cool group. Possibility to talk and play chess with various people from different countries in spite of our difference in culture and political principles is great.

I actually just finished reading The Idiot.  I've always loved Russian literature.  I only wish that I could read it in the original language.  I would LOVE to visit Russia.

Serious book, it is difficult read Dostoevsky even for Russians. But it is pleasure for me to know that some people in USA read russian classics because as I heard most of americans don't like read a lot. USA  is very young country but you have few good writers, last year I had red Steinbek(Am I write corrrect ?) in russian translation, his books are good.

Yes we've had quite a nice number of wonderful writers of our own.  This year I've read Gogol's Dead Souls, 2 from Dosteovsky, and The Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn.  If you liked Steinbeck you should find a Russian translation of a book called "My Name is Asher Lev" by an American writer named Chaim Potok.  It is a marvelous book.